I’ve been spending a lot of time online the past few days. Like you, I’ve been looking for answers, comfort, reassurances. I’ve found very few real answers or reassurances, but plenty of comfort and wisdom – particularly from middle-aged and older women who have already been through so much in their lifetimes. There truly are an incredible number of amazing humans out there. We are not alone in this struggle; nor have we ever been. It is our past for women, people of color, Native Americans, and marginalized people in the United States, and it remains all around us worldwide.
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Trust the journey. Trust yourself, Dianne. Trust. I kept telling myself this. I needed to trust. And to draw from everything I’ve learned so far when I was in a funk this past fall. When I was depressed. Yes, I’ll say the word that people sometimes have a hard time saying: I was “depressed.” 2022 was a really hard year for me with initial Lynch Syndrome screenings and related surgeries; a long bout of Covid; continuing, successive and confusing joint issues and pain constantly interfering with my hopes of finding physical strength and fitness again; and a persnickety digestive system
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My husband and I have a vacation rental in the mountains, which I’ve written about in my House Therapy posts. In these, I parallel what it was like and what it meant to me – especially retrospectively – to embark on an all-encompassing creative endeavor during the exact same time I was going through the exhausting justice process. (By the way, I still plan on completing my House Therapy project, possibly as a book. Meanwhile, you can find chapters one through six starting here:https://diannehammer.com/2020/11/house-therapy-chapter-one-2/ ) John and I hope someday we won’t have to rent out our mountain house, but
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Content Warning: Assault Triggers It takes a long time for trauma survivors to process through the original event or events – as well as deal with what happened after, during the fallout period. I still discover at least monthly how I feel about “another something” related to the sexual assault I experienced in 2018. Healing is peeling back the layers of the trauma gradually and carefully, as we are able and ready, to deal with the next thing underneath. We can’t deal with the buried layers – or maybe even know those layers exist — until we’ve processed what’s above.
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Last night I went to a large abortion-rights rally downtown, and I was surrounded predominantly by young through early middle-aged women and people from the LGBTQ community. There were also older women like me, and maybe about 5% to 10% men. In the middle of this huge crowd of passionate (and scared, frustrated, angry) people, I had a BIG realization. *** Since I was sexually assaulted 4 years ago, I’ve thought a lot about hypotheticals: What was his ultimate plan? What if he had completely overpowered me and kidnapped me? What if he had physically hurt me worse than he
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It is astonishingly beautiful, this new landscape emerging from the trauma of fire. No longer is it just a desert-scape dark cemetery of loss and despair. Now: It is a square-miles-wide plant nursery exploding with tender and bold new life and color. A changed world rising up among the skeletons of the Before. My heart bursts! I feel a level of joy I didn’t think possible after fearing the emotions, avoiding the core of East Troublesome’s heat for so long — skating along its edges, dipping my toes in. But driving into the 2020 speedway of the fire’s fury, I
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I write in my head On my way to pick up the dog,overshoot by a mile, lost in thought: I compose four years 2017TRUMP Stress & Fear Surreal2018Sex ASSAULT Stress & Fear Surreal2019Justice Pursuit COURT Stress Fear Surreal2020Covid-19 PANDEMIC Stress & Fear Surreal!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yeah, pretty shittyPoor Me In the shower use all the hot water,lost in thought: I compose four years 2017Rocked 50 Marched Most Fit STRENGTH2018Adopted Wiggling-Wagging Love JOY2019Created mountain HAVEn PEACE2020Found my Voice POWEROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Yeah, I see.I’m LuckyI AM OK New Year’s coming2021will bewhat it will bewhat it will beandWHAT I DO.That, too … Dare to Conquer 2021 Grandson
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Two years ago this week, we closed on our mountain house and became the new owners. It honestly felt so surreal as we signed the final papers from the typical very tall stack, and left the meeting. Was it ours? Was it really ours? It was really ours! We lived here now. In Grand County, a county we had spent so much time visiting for 20 years. We could now call it home. John and I felt like kids let loose in a candy story of possibility. There was something new and good in our lives. We needed this good
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I grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s as part of a Swedish-American family in a suburban home just beyond the city limits of St. Paul, Minnesota. The last sibling to arrive, I joined my older sister, two brothers and parents in a small, single-story house on a cul de sac of other starter homes built in the 1950s. In my generation, suburban homes did not necessarily equate to more space. We lived lightly crammed together, six people sharing one bathroom. But that didn’t seem particularly unusual to me when I was young. Nor did it seem odd that there
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